How to Get Your Customers to Become Brand Advocates: A Step-by-Step Guide

To be a leading brand in the industry today, you must enhance a customer's experience. Out-of-the-World customer experience drives brand advocacy. What is it exactly? In layman terms, brand advocates are those who support and elevate the growth of your brand, through word of mouth marketing.

A very powerful tool that drives almost 4 times better results than paid marketing methods; brand advocates are the most credible mediums of marketing. Based on principles of trust, Airbnb grew from $100 million to over $31 billion in just 6 years.Starbucks, on the other hand, offered an excellent customer journey to turn first-time visitors into brand advocates. This strategy brought home an annual growth of 11% and over $84 billion in market revenue.

So here is how you too can successfully nurture a brand advocacy program for your brand:

STEP 1: Find Your Brand Advocates

There are plenty of ways to implement brand advocacy. But the right way is to start at the bottom of the funnel. Narrow down your brand advocates before curating a journey for them to share. Brand advocates organically share a brand’s message without any personal greed. Today, customers, especially millennials, want to associate with a brand first. So, find your audience and get behind the scenes of what inspires them about your brand. The next steps will follow.

STEP 2: Engage With Your Brand Advocates

Brand advocacy is very different from typical advertising. It is driven by passion and love for a brand. And 78% of people admit that they are more likely to trust content shared by other normal people than a paid banner. So ensure that you engage with your advocates through your products, newsletters and social media. Strike a chord of love, friendship or happiness through a beautifully embodied packaging that will make customers want to engage with your brand.

STEP 3: Listen To Your Brand Advocates & Take Feedback

Brand advocates add more credibility to a brand than any paid promotion ever would. They give a brand, access to new markets across industries. So when it comes to catering to their needs, you must listen. Like Patagonia, a high-performance outdoor clothing and gear retailer realized that their customers believed in socially conscious activism.

So they took the advice and implemented everything from fair wages to zero wastage in their organization. This gave customers a reason to support and advocate for them.

STEP 4: Invest in Promotional Giveaways

Okay, brand advocacy is not entirely free. But it is still has a much lesser investment value as compared to other methods. Generate a social media buzz to include customers you otherwise would not target. Use promotional giveaways as gratification to keep brand advocates satisfied and motivated. It could be something small and even cheap. But not low quality; because there is nothing worse than finding a branded giveaway in the trash can. As long as you deliver to your brand advocates, they will return the favour to you.

STEP 5: Drive a Loyalty Program

Brand advocacy and loyalty are two sides of the same coin. Now that over 92% of people admit to seeking social recommendations before buying a product, brand advocacy plays a pivotal role in supporting a brand's growth. A loyalty program that rewards brand advocates in a language they understand is sure to maximize your ROI in both marketing and sales.

Takeaway

Start by understanding your brand’s vision and purpose. Why would a customer want to be associated with a brand like yours? Do you add value to their lives?

Next, reward them for their loyalty and support. And this is where we, at 5By7, can help. Find premium quality promotional products at budget-friendly prices and keep your brand advocates rooting for you!